4 reasons most advertising fails

How many times have you decided to SPEND MONEY ON MARKETING,only to discover it didn't work?

Thousands of NZ business people suffer the same disappointment every year. Yet there is no need for this to happen. The fault is not yours. The problem lies with the marketing professionals you hire, if they don’t know how to boost your profits with marketing. Here are the four secrets about what has been going wrong with your marketing.

1. You didn’t tell your customer what they wanted to know.

Designers think that ads should be works of art (sound familiar?). Ad agencies are hell-bent on entertaining your target audience with humour and puns and many media reps just want to sell you space. Yet research shows your customers are natural window shoppers – they are looking for products that interest them. They want to know whether your product can make their lives more pleasant or solve a problem. This means that telling your customer what they want to know in your marketing is JUST AS IMPORTANT as what your marketing looks like. You MUST combine good design AND what your customers want to know if you want your marketing to boost your profits.

2. Your marketing did not tell a ‘selling story’ or appeal to the ‘self-interest’ of your customer.

Your customer wants to know ‘what’s in it for them’ – does your product have something they like and enjoy? If so, your ad must tell them and it must do so quickly. If it does not, the TV watcher, or newspaper reader, will move on and you will have wasted your money.

3. Your customers did not associate your ‘brand’ with a benefit.

There is an enormous amount of money wasted on what managers wrongly think of as ‘branding’. Many managers think of branding as a look that must stay consistent in their ads. They hope that this will have a magic effect on sales. But most of them are disappointed, because unless your customers associate your brand with a benefit, you’ve wasted your money.

4.You didn’t make it clear who your ad was for.

Eighty percent of people will only read the headline in your brochure, website or newspaper ad. And they only take notice of the first few seconds of your radio ad or TV commercial. If you have not summarised your selling story in those few short moments, you have WASTED ALL YOUR MONEY.

"It's imperative to ensure that you understand these four reasons so that you don't have to make the same mistakes over and over. Once you've worked out what not to do, it's time to move onwards and upwards. Why not come along to our FREE Marketing Seminarwhere you will learn the four steps to marketing profits."